768 is only marginally tall enough, since some inconsiderate app developers are making simple dialog boxes taller than that. Can we have some names?
I've found a lot of apps have dialogs too big for a 600 pixel high screen but I don't think i've seen one yet that goes over on a 768 pixel high screen.
9" was the sweet spot for me. For me the sweet spot is a 10 inch with a decent screen resoloution, the extra inch of size is barely noticeable and yet it allows a much more capable machine. Unforuntately the vast majority of 10 inch models have a screen resoloution no better than the 9 inch models.
No. That's the purpose of an SSL certificate. URLs serve as a means to request information from a known source. They do nothing to verify where it's from. However in the case of repositries for a distribution SSL is a suboptimal soloution for two main reasons.
Firstly implementing SSL creates a LOT of extra work for the server. That means either more processing power on the servers or special SSL accelerators either of which means a substantial increase in cost for mirror operators.
Secondly most users (at least on debian which is where secure apt originated from, I don't use ubuntu but I expect things are the same on that side of the fence) get thier distribution package from third party mirrors. If the mirror you use becomes malicious (either through being hacked or through a malicious admin) then ssl doesn't really help you.
With secure apt compromising the mirror is not sufficient, they actually have to compromise the master keys used to sign the package lists.
It requires international transactions within the member countries to cost the same as national transfers. Afaict it only requires international transactions within the member countries IN EUROS to cost the same as national transfers IN EUROS.
So they can still charge you through the nose for making/receiving a euro payment on a sterling account.
how much card companies charge seems to be harder to find out (and I think it varies a lot by how big a buisness you are) but IIRC there is a flat fee (which i think is higher than 25p but i'm not sure, probablly varies by merchant provider and size of account) for debit cards and a percentage fee for credit cards. On top of that there are subscription fees and there may be deposits against chargebacks etc depending on how risky they consider you.
they dont, they don't see your card either if you use that over the phone or online. This adds risk to remote transactions. OTOH they have to give you an address for delivery which may make it easier to track them down and set the debt collectors on them.
I'm sure the credit card companies want adoption to be increased No they want to maximise thier profits, roughly that means they way to maximise (profit per transaction*number of transactions). Keeping the margins up is acheived by making the people who chosee which card system to use and the people who has to eat the fees different.
Do you really belive that people would use thier cards in shops if they had to pay extra to do so? I know I wouldn't unless I had no choice.
I agree sometimes sensible (meaningful and moderate length) is better (e.g. when speaking or remembering the url) and sometimes supershort (what you get from a shortening service) is better (services with horriblly constrained message size limits).
However in nearly all cases both are much better than a long horrible url. Therefore I belive that more sane urls would reduce (but not eliminate) the demand for shortening services.
Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know Issuing a redirect to the right place requires access to the database, issueing an error message does not.
P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.
As others in this discussion have pointed out, if the concern about Oracle close-sourcing components of MySQL, A much bigger concern would be if oracle refused to sell people licenses to link new copies of thier propietry software with the MySQL client libraries.
then why not fork it now? People already have, the trouble is afaict mysql made most of it's money by selling the aforementioned licenses. No company can sell thier fork to those customers unless the customers are prepared to opensource thier apps.
Also, beyond the large installed user base, is there anything particularly important about MySQL as a database that other open source databases cannot do? Not really IMO, it's one of the fastest ones but only if you use the unsafe myisam table type.
But for me, the biggest frustration is that while there is all this concern about MySQL, the lack of direction is really damaging Sun who make excellent servers (SPARC and x64), software (Solaris 10/Open Solaris with ZFS, Dtrace, Containers etc. etc, OpenOffice, Glassfish, Virtualbox, Sun Cluster (free), QFS/SAMFS (cluster FS)) and many more interesting technologies).
IMHO, the existence of Sun is a positive thing for the open source community and MySQL is a small and largely unimportant part of Sun's inventory. Agreed.
Afaict mysql makes most of it's money by exploiting the "fact"* that you need a "commercial license" to link against the mysql client libraries. No forker can sell a commercial license for thier fork of mysql.
*Some disagree with this interpretation of the GPL but until proven otherwise in all judristrictions you plan to operate in the only safe thing to do is assume it is true.
P.S. I think this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, there are many other players (both free and propietry) in the low end database market and I really don't think it's in oracles interests to kill mysql and push people to them.
That's 35 DAYS of actual scanning, people don't work solidly.
more realistically with a 50 hour working week (which is rather on the high side) it's 17 working weeks or about a third of a man-year.
If you use minimum wage labour (or value your own time that low) it's probablly still cheaper than buying the commercial scanner new and throwing it away/putting it in the loft and forgetting about it afterwards but I bet it's higher than the cost of buying the commercial scanner used, doing the scans and reselling it.
Unfortunately most people don't know that and/or don't want to pay the cost of headphones that actually specify that and/or don't want to carry arround two sets.
Afaict the standard issue headphones are open designs so when people want to listen to thier music and nothing else they turn the volume up way too loud.
What you are describing is essentially a pyramid scheme, it often works for the initial entrants but as the number of people involved in the scheme grows it becomes impossible to recruit enough suckers for the scheme to continue.
I think you identified the problem right there. The real underlying problem is that a standard is most useful when all the major vendors* involved use it and becomes less useful the less of them use it.
Steering a path between a load of conflicting interests takes a lot of time and effort but if a standards body doesn't do it then (unless forced by government) their standards will not gain acceptance.
*I include major FOSS projects in the definition of vendors here.
This happens wherever people's livelihood depends on Government Grants. Invariably, someone will end up committing fraud to keep getting the grants. I'd think it happens wherever peoples livelihood depends on apparent results and/or telling the bosses what they want to hear.
I wonder how many people knew the models that were driving the housing bubble in the US knew about the fundamental flaws in thier models but either kept thier mouths shut or were ignored because the models were saying what the bosses wanted to hear.
Hardware isn't special in requiring money/time to develop so why is it that this question only really gets asked when an open philosophy is applied to physical objects? The difference is in the barrier to entry.
I can download a linux distribution which is an OS easilly comparable and some would say better than it's closed source competition. Using nothing other than my standard desktop PC and my time I can fix things that piss me off and submit patches for those to the upstream projects. Even if I don't submit the fixes upstream I can deploy the fixed version of the software to as many machines as I want for no more cost other than my time and the time cost will be comparable to deploying the unmodified version.
Now suppose I could download the hardware design for a competitive motherboard or the verilog code for a competitive processor. What exactly could I do with it? In the former case nothing without spending huge sums of money! In the latter case maybe I could run it on a huge FPGA but that would be neither cheap nor fast.
Unfortunately while CAD and simulation software help to some extent they are no substitute for prototyping. Prototyping with slow 8 bit internal memory stuff like pics isn't too bad but as soon as you move beyond that things start to get very expensive (easilly hundreds of pounds per prototype)
I remember a TV series called "scrappy races", it was a scrapheap challenge offshoot. The teams had to each produce a base rig on a fairly low budget (couple of thousand pounds IIRC) then they had to take the base rig to various scrapheaps and modify it for varionsu challanges.
Anyway the base rigs had to be road legal;). Different teams took different approaches to this. Some bit the bullet and went through the SVA (not an easy test to pass). Some kept the modifications to the original vehicles small enough that they didn't need to. One team registered as an agricultural show vehicle and thereby got thier massive completely custom rig road legal without having to go through the SVA!
oops I pasted something in the wrong place, the corrected version of the list is below
conventional light aircraft: cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend), fairly expensive to buy and maintain (but less so than other options here), needs to be stored at an airport (adds cost) which you must return to to pick it up again.
roadable aircraft: cramped , regulatory issues with trying to get approved as both a car and a plane, special mechanisms needed for conversion between flight and road configurations. These factors drive up the cost.
helicopter: noisy, difficult to fly and very expensive to run, probablly cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend) but can land in a relatively small space. Popular with the very rich who can afford the high running costs and the cost of the pilot.
flying car based on downward jet thrust: very noisy, insane fuel consumption, probablly pretty dangerous too.
Scifi flying car (quiet running, vtol, car size and shape): technically unfeasible with current techology.
I don't think safety is a primary hinderance at this stage, yeah light aircraft are a bit more dangerous than cars but not insanely so.
At some point if light air traffic were to increase hugely then we would need some kind of highways in the sky system for light planes but I personally don't see us getting to the point for other reasons.
You don't define flying car so lets consider a few categories of personal air vehicle and thier problems (ordered from most currently practical to least currently practical).
conventional light aircraft: cramped, fairly expensive to buy and maintain (but less so than other options here), needs to be stored at an airport (adds cost) which you must return to to pick it up again.
roadable aircraft: cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend), regulatory issues with trying to get approved as both a car and a plane, special mechanisms needed for conversion between flight and road configurations. These factors drive up the cost.
helicopter: noisy, difficult to fly and very expensive to run, probablly cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend) but can land in a relatively small space. Popular with the very rich who can afford the high running costs and the cost of the pilot.
flying car based on downward jet thrust: very noisy, insane fuel consumption, probablly pretty dangerous too.
Scifi flying car (quiet running, vtol, car size and shape): technically unfeasible with current techology.
Slashdot Mirror
768 is only marginally tall enough, since some inconsiderate app developers are making simple dialog boxes taller than that.
Can we have some names?
I've found a lot of apps have dialogs too big for a 600 pixel high screen but I don't think i've seen one yet that goes over on a 768 pixel high screen.
9" was the sweet spot for me.
For me the sweet spot is a 10 inch with a decent screen resoloution, the extra inch of size is barely noticeable and yet it allows a much more capable machine. Unforuntately the vast majority of 10 inch models have a screen resoloution no better than the 9 inch models.
I don't know if Asus are still making 9" models, but they have dried up completely in the UK.
they are becoming rare but they haven't dissapeared just yet, for example dabs have a disney rebranded one.
http://www.dabs.com/products/asus-dinsey-mk90h-blu017x-1gb-xph-6CHG.html?refs=408510000
sounds like a good reason not to get used to HD in the first place......
Just like I pity the people who train thier ears to hear mp3 artifacts.
No. That's the purpose of an SSL certificate. URLs serve as a means to request information from a known source. They do nothing to verify where it's from.
However in the case of repositries for a distribution SSL is a suboptimal soloution for two main reasons.
Firstly implementing SSL creates a LOT of extra work for the server. That means either more processing power on the servers or special SSL accelerators either of which means a substantial increase in cost for mirror operators.
Secondly most users (at least on debian which is where secure apt originated from, I don't use ubuntu but I expect things are the same on that side of the fence) get thier distribution package from third party mirrors. If the mirror you use becomes malicious (either through being hacked or through a malicious admin) then ssl doesn't really help you.
With secure apt compromising the mirror is not sufficient, they actually have to compromise the master keys used to sign the package lists.
The thing is once someone starts blocking adverts why wouldn't they just block all of them?
It requires international transactions within the member countries to cost the same as national transfers.
Afaict it only requires international transactions within the member countries IN EUROS to cost the same as national transfers IN EUROS.
So they can still charge you through the nose for making/receiving a euro payment on a sterling account.
You are labouring under the assumption that cheques are a cheap form of payment for small businesses. They are not
Lets see:
http://www.bankofscotlandbusiness.co.uk/importantinfo/pdfs/about-your-accout_business.pdf says 25p each for paying cheques into your buisness current account, for the customer cheques from a personal account are free.
how much card companies charge seems to be harder to find out (and I think it varies a lot by how big a buisness you are) but IIRC there is a flat fee (which i think is higher than 25p but i'm not sure, probablly varies by merchant provider and size of account) for debit cards and a percentage fee for credit cards. On top of that there are subscription fees and there may be deposits against chargebacks etc depending on how risky they consider you.
they dont, they don't see your card either if you use that over the phone or online. This adds risk to remote transactions. OTOH they have to give you an address for delivery which may make it easier to track them down and set the debt collectors on them.
I'm sure the credit card companies want adoption to be increased
No they want to maximise thier profits, roughly that means they way to maximise (profit per transaction*number of transactions). Keeping the margins up is acheived by making the people who chosee which card system to use and the people who has to eat the fees different.
Do you really belive that people would use thier cards in shops if they had to pay extra to do so? I know I wouldn't unless I had no choice.
umm where in TFA does it say that?!
I agree sometimes sensible (meaningful and moderate length) is better (e.g. when speaking or remembering the url) and sometimes supershort (what you get from a shortening service) is better (services with horriblly constrained message size limits).
However in nearly all cases both are much better than a long horrible url. Therefore I belive that more sane urls would reduce (but not eliminate) the demand for shortening services.
Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know
Issuing a redirect to the right place requires access to the database, issueing an error message does not.
P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.
As others in this discussion have pointed out, if the concern about Oracle close-sourcing components of MySQL,
A much bigger concern would be if oracle refused to sell people licenses to link new copies of thier propietry software with the MySQL client libraries.
then why not fork it now?
People already have, the trouble is afaict mysql made most of it's money by selling the aforementioned licenses. No company can sell thier fork to those customers unless the customers are prepared to opensource thier apps.
Also, beyond the large installed user base, is there anything particularly important about MySQL as a database that other open source databases cannot do?
Not really IMO, it's one of the fastest ones but only if you use the unsafe myisam table type.
But for me, the biggest frustration is that while there is all this concern about MySQL, the lack of direction is really damaging Sun who make excellent servers (SPARC and x64), software (Solaris 10/Open Solaris with ZFS, Dtrace, Containers etc. etc, OpenOffice, Glassfish, Virtualbox, Sun Cluster (free), QFS/SAMFS (cluster FS)) and many more interesting technologies).
IMHO, the existence of Sun is a positive thing for the open source community and MySQL is a small and largely unimportant part of Sun's inventory.
Agreed.
Afaict mysql makes most of it's money by exploiting the "fact"* that you need a "commercial license" to link against the mysql client libraries. No forker can sell a commercial license for thier fork of mysql.
*Some disagree with this interpretation of the GPL but until proven otherwise in all judristrictions you plan to operate in the only safe thing to do is assume it is true.
P.S. I think this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, there are many other players (both free and propietry) in the low end database market and I really don't think it's in oracles interests to kill mysql and push people to them.
That's 35 DAYS of actual scanning, people don't work solidly.
more realistically with a 50 hour working week (which is rather on the high side) it's 17 working weeks or about a third of a man-year.
If you use minimum wage labour (or value your own time that low) it's probablly still cheaper than buying the commercial scanner new and throwing it away/putting it in the loft and forgetting about it afterwards but I bet it's higher than the cost of buying the commercial scanner used, doing the scans and reselling it.
Unfortunately most people don't know that and/or don't want to pay the cost of headphones that actually specify that and/or don't want to carry arround two sets.
Afaict the standard issue headphones are open designs so when people want to listen to thier music and nothing else they turn the volume up way too loud.
What you are describing is essentially a pyramid scheme, it often works for the initial entrants but as the number of people involved in the scheme grows it becomes impossible to recruit enough suckers for the scheme to continue.
I think you identified the problem right there.
The real underlying problem is that a standard is most useful when all the major vendors* involved use it and becomes less useful the less of them use it.
Steering a path between a load of conflicting interests takes a lot of time and effort but if a standards body doesn't do it then (unless forced by government) their standards will not gain acceptance.
*I include major FOSS projects in the definition of vendors here.
This happens wherever people's livelihood depends on Government Grants. Invariably, someone will end up committing fraud to keep getting the grants.
I'd think it happens wherever peoples livelihood depends on apparent results and/or telling the bosses what they want to hear.
I wonder how many people knew the models that were driving the housing bubble in the US knew about the fundamental flaws in thier models but either kept thier mouths shut or were ignored because the models were saying what the bosses wanted to hear.
Hardware isn't special in requiring money/time to develop so why is it that this question only really gets asked when an open philosophy is applied to physical objects?
The difference is in the barrier to entry.
I can download a linux distribution which is an OS easilly comparable and some would say better than it's closed source competition. Using nothing other than my standard desktop PC and my time I can fix things that piss me off and submit patches for those to the upstream projects. Even if I don't submit the fixes upstream I can deploy the fixed version of the software to as many machines as I want for no more cost other than my time and the time cost will be comparable to deploying the unmodified version.
Now suppose I could download the hardware design for a competitive motherboard or the verilog code for a competitive processor. What exactly could I do with it? In the former case nothing without spending huge sums of money! In the latter case maybe I could run it on a huge FPGA but that would be neither cheap nor fast.
Unfortunately while CAD and simulation software help to some extent they are no substitute for prototyping. Prototyping with slow 8 bit internal memory stuff like pics isn't too bad but as soon as you move beyond that things start to get very expensive (easilly hundreds of pounds per prototype)
I remember a TV series called "scrappy races", it was a scrapheap challenge offshoot. The teams had to each produce a base rig on a fairly low budget (couple of thousand pounds IIRC) then they had to take the base rig to various scrapheaps and modify it for varionsu challanges.
Anyway the base rigs had to be road legal ;). Different teams took different approaches to this. Some bit the bullet and went through the SVA (not an easy test to pass). Some kept the modifications to the original vehicles small enough that they didn't need to. One team registered as an agricultural show vehicle and thereby got thier massive completely custom rig road legal without having to go through the SVA!
oops I pasted something in the wrong place, the corrected version of the list is below
conventional light aircraft: cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend), fairly expensive to buy and maintain (but less so than other options here), needs to be stored at an airport (adds cost) which you must return to to pick it up again.
roadable aircraft: cramped , regulatory issues with trying to get approved as both a car and a plane, special mechanisms needed for conversion between flight and road configurations. These factors drive up the cost.
helicopter: noisy, difficult to fly and very expensive to run, probablly cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend) but can land in a relatively small space. Popular with the very rich who can afford the high running costs and the cost of the pilot.
flying car based on downward jet thrust: very noisy, insane fuel consumption, probablly pretty dangerous too.
Scifi flying car (quiet running, vtol, car size and shape): technically unfeasible with current techology.
I don't think safety is a primary hinderance at this stage, yeah light aircraft are a bit more dangerous than cars but not insanely so.
At some point if light air traffic were to increase hugely then we would need some kind of highways in the sky system for light planes but I personally don't see us getting to the point for other reasons.
You don't define flying car so lets consider a few categories of personal air vehicle and thier problems (ordered from most currently practical to least currently practical).
conventional light aircraft: cramped, fairly expensive to buy and maintain (but less so than other options here), needs to be stored at an airport (adds cost) which you must return to to pick it up again.
roadable aircraft: cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend), regulatory issues with trying to get approved as both a car and a plane, special mechanisms needed for conversion between flight and road configurations. These factors drive up the cost.
helicopter: noisy, difficult to fly and very expensive to run, probablly cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend) but can land in a relatively small space. Popular with the very rich who can afford the high running costs and the cost of the pilot.
flying car based on downward jet thrust: very noisy, insane fuel consumption, probablly pretty dangerous too.
Scifi flying car (quiet running, vtol, car size and shape): technically unfeasible with current techology.
except that isn't what we do, we throw pretty large bunches of particles and some of them collide.